With 8,100 mailboxes already in Office 365, Investec's last on-premises dependency was Enterprise Vault. It chose to bring back only the items users still had shortcuts to, and leave everything they'd deleted where it was.
Investec moved its whole messaging platform to Office 365 as part of a cost-reduction programme. Its users are concentrated in South Africa, the UK and Australia, with smaller offices across five continents. Once mailboxes were in the cloud, Enterprise Vault was an on-premises system kept alive mainly so users could open old shortcuts. Retiring it was the obvious next step.
There are two ways to empty Enterprise Vault into Office 365.
Copy everything back. Move each user's entire archive into their Office 365 archive, then delete the shortcuts. Simple to describe, but it ignores how users actually behave. When someone deletes a shortcut, they believe they've deleted the email. The original is still in the vault. Copy everything back and years of mail users deliberately threw away reappears, and you pay to move data nobody wants.
Rehydrate the shortcuts that still exist. Find every shortcut still in a mailbox, fetch the original from the vault, and put it back in place of the stub. Users see their mail exactly where they left it. What they deleted stays deleted. Far less data crosses the wire.
Investec chose the second.
If your mailboxes are already in Microsoft 365, rehydrating shortcuts in place is often the quickest and cleanest way out of Enterprise Vault. It respects users' decisions, keeps mailboxes lean and minimises data transfer. Any remaining archive content can still go to an online archive or a compliance hold.
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